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St Peter
and St Paul, Tuttington

Through the hills from Skeyton, along narrow
lanes on the first bright spring day of the year. Not a
car in sight - in fact, apart from a couple of people
gardening in Tuttington itself, and another cyclist on
the back road down to the Bure, I saw not a soul between
leaving RAF Coltishall and meeting the
vicar of Burgh-next-Aylsham some eight miles later.

In this
strangely remote area between Aylsham and North Walsham,
pretty villages huddle in the dips, and roads obey the
old medieval strip field plan system, cutting back at dog
legs for no apparent reason. Coming into Tuttington, I
found it a compact, pretty village, with flint cottages,
houses with Flemish gables and its fair share of
bungalows. The church is tucked fairly tightly behind
farm buildings, and although I had visited enough
churches in this area to assume that it would be open, I
had not read anything about it, and had no idea
whatsoever what to expect.

The big
perpendicular windows and two storey porch outshine the
simple round tower a bit, and a homogenity in the flint
of the whole piece suggests a late medieval rebuilding,
and then a considerable restoration. You step into a wide
open space, free of clutter and full of light. There is
no step into the chancel, which is cleared completely
apart from the sanctuary. Big windows, white walls,
sunlight falling on tiled floors. Just another church?
Well, not quite. Tuttington has an exceptionally fine
collection of medieval bench ends. In Norfolk, we expect
to find some in big churches, but not small ones in
little out of the way places - that is a characteristic
of Suffolk. But these are as good as anything you'll find
in a small church in the southern county, putting me in
mind of Ixworth Thorpe and Lakenheath.

Strikingly,
they appear to form a set - there are about a dozen of
them, and they have been placed as the front half of the
benches in the nave. Either there were once more, or this
churched was only benched for half the nave, or, I am
afraid, they are from somewhere else originally. Never
mind, and in any case we can never know.

On the
north side, the bench end that was obviously designed for
the most westerly bench features an alert guard dog
wearing a collar. On the bench end in front of him, a
grinning wild man with a club creeps up on a dragon. Also
on this side, a woman churns butter, her hands and the
stick now lost, a man beats on a tambour, and, curiously,
a woman allows her basket to be rifled by wild animals,
one of them a beaver.

On the
north side there is an excellent elephant and castle, a
grinning face peeping out of the castle. The elephant is
very lifelike, and you can't help thinking that the
artist must have seen one. There are two dogs, one with a
duck or goose in its mouth. There's another musician, and
another curiosity: a man appears to be feeding a gryphon
- or is it eating him?

They are a
bit battered about, but the damage is as likely to be the
rough and tumble of the centuries as much as any form of
iconoclasm. One of the poppyheads takes the form of a
face with the tongue sticking out. I have sometimes seen
this described as 'scandal', but it is such a common
thing to find, and so rarely in conjunction with the
other deadly sins, that I think this cannot be right.

There is a
big rustic font, and on it a cover that is probably 17th
century. The pulpit is also of that period, dated 1635,
so perhaps they are contemporary. I liked this church a
lot, and it provides a perfect setting for its treasures.